Blogs don't have a "home page", main page or "landing page" in the same way that regular web-sites do. Instead, they show the newest post first, since (hopefully!) most readers will be return visitors, coming back to see what's new. But there may be blogs/websites where you want a welcome message or a particular post to appear first whenever someone visits your blog, or where you want to put all your posts in reverse order.
This article is about options for giving your Blogger blog a "home page".
It lists three options, and gives advantages/disadvantages of each approach, and links to articles with details about implementing each case.
If you can think of any more approaches, please leave a comment below.
(It's not possible to make one of your static-pages into the landing page, because static pages don't have dates attached to them.)
Summary:
Options for giving your blog a home page include:
Advantages and Disadvantages of each option:
| Option | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| Show all posts in reverse order | Great for new readers - they can "follow the story". | Return visitors have to navigate down to where they were up to last time: the blog has no way of helping them to remember where that was. You can't use most of Blogger's date features: newer and older posts links will take the reader in the "wrong" direction. And you have to manually enter any dates that would be relevant. Your posts will get "older" as you write more: this may confuse search-engines, and there's a risk that google might to things to "very old" posts in the future. |
| Make one post always show up first | You can still use all of Google's date features. Readers will know when you actually posted to your blog. Great for returning readers: they can see your (current) welcome comments, and then go straight to the latest post after that. | You have to remember to edit the "chosen" post every single time that you make a new post - one day, you might forget. This approach probably won't work on multi-author blogs: there's a very high chance that someone would forget to edit the chosen post and change its date. |
| Show a "welcome gadget" on the home page only | Doesn't need any changes to Post date-time settings. Your blog still functions like a blog (older/newer post links , archive gadget etc). An HTML/Javascript gadget can be very flexible, and you can get Blogger to write all the HTML for you - see Making a Gadget Like a Post. You can use things other than text, eg a picture or even a poll. It includes an extreme option: you could show no posts on the "home" page, and just show the gadget. | You need to edit your HTML template to make this work. You need to re-do the template customisation every time that you change templates. The welcome gadget isn't one of your posts: it's not included in exports of your blog contents (It is in an export of your template - but I don't think that the words inside it are included). A gadget cannot show quite as many things as a post. |
Can you think of other ways? Please leave a comment below.
Recommendation:
You need to think about your blog, and how you want to work with it, to decide which approach to use.
Personally, I have one blog-site that I built using option 1: if I was doing it again, I would use option 2. But that is for a fairly specialist site, which doesn't function at all like a blog.
In general, (provided you're willing to do edit your template), I think Option 3 is best, because it doesn't mess around with Dates, and therefore it should always work with Google in the future.
A non-option: Setting the homepage's post date into the future
Some people suggest that you can set the post-date of your main page in the future - and at some times in Blogger's past this has worked.
But now that scheduled posting is working the way most people expect it to (ie if you write a post today, and publish it with tomorrow's date, then it is shown to your readers from tomorrow onwards), this will not work - because your "home page" won't show until that future date is reached.
There may be some ways you can fudge it in to working (eg post the page with a date in the past, and then post it again with a future date). But I VERY STRONGLY don't recommend this: even if they work today, they may stop working at some time in the future when Google make a change to how future-dated posts are handled.